Today’s Question: I have a lot of images from the country of Oman. Unfortunately, every time I ask Lightroom Classic to search for images with the keyword Oman it also shows every image with the keyword woman. It doesn’t seem to want to believe me that I’m only searching for “Oman” and I don’t want every image with “woman”. I have never seen any solution to this.
Tim’s Quick Answer: There are actually a couple of options you could use here. One is to use the “Contains Words” option for a text search, and another is to use a quick search from the Keyword List.
More Detail: Lightroom Classic provides several methods you can use to locate photos that contain keywords. Some of these are rather broad searches, which may include unintended search results as outlined in today’s question. For example, a basic search under the Text tab of the Library Filter bar will include all photos that have the characters you enter within the Keywords field, even if those characters comprise only part of an actual keyword for some of those photos.
You can, however, search for a specific keyword without including photos that don’t include that specific keyword.
First, you could use the “Contains Words” option for the text search. First, go to the Text tab on the Library Filter bar in the grid view for the Library module. You can choose View > Show Filter Bar from the menu if the Library Filter isn’t shown. Set the first popup on the Text tab to “Keywords” and set the second popup to “Contains Words”.
With these settings established, when you type a word (or words separated by commas) into the text box, only photos that contain the specific word (or words) in the Keywords field of metadata will be included in the search results.
Another option is to use the Keyword List to locate photos that include a specific keyword. Locate the keyword you want to search for in the Keyword List on the right panel in the Library module. When you hover your mouse over a keyword on that list you’ll see a right-pointing arrow to the right of the keyword. Click that arrow, and you will be taken to a search result featuring photos that contain that specific keyword.
With either of these approaches you can locate photos that contain specific keywords, without photos that simply contain similar keywords. For example, these methods would enable you to easily locate photos that contain “Oman” as a keyword, without including photos that include “woman” as a keyword without also including “Oman”.